Extra Project: Build your own PC
This was an extra credit project where I was to build a PC that I would use within a $1000 budget. The budget was just for the computer itself and what the exercise was for was picking all the basic components and making sure that everything worked together. This was for my Introduction to PCs class.
The style of computer that I would build at this time would have a very specific use. Since I would like to start my own IT Consulting style business, my thoughts wandered to a home server to learn on and sharpen my teeth. In that frame of mind is how I approached this project and with the intention of actual building this sometime soon. First I will list out the components I chose then discuss why I went with them.
| Part | Product | Price |
| Processor | AMD 955 | $160.00 |
| Motherboard | ASUS M4A78T-E | $115.00 |
| Power Supply | COOLMAX CTI-600B 600W ATX12V | $50.00 |
| Memory | G. Skill Ripjaw 2GB PC12800 DDR3 1600 RAM X4 | $220.00 |
| Hard Drive | Transcend SSD 32GB with 2.5” to 3.5” adapter | $134.00 |
| Seagate Barracuda 1.5TB 3.5” HDD | $100.00 | |
| Seagate Barracuda 1.5TB 3.5” HDD | $85.00 | |
| Optical Drive | LITE-ON DVD ROM +/-RW, DVD RAM, CD +/-RW 24X | $30.00 |
| Case | Thermaltake V9 | $100.00 |
| Total | $994.00 |
I started my search by looking for a case. I knew that I wanted to make a small server that would host a few things. I was thinking of a website, maybe some email, and some databases related to the business that I want to start. So with that in mind I knew that I would want this home server to be on all the time so cooling would be a huge factor. I started by looking on a site called frozencpus.com for home server cases. These are REALLY expensive so a small jump over the the gaming cases. After a little bit of debating and comparing specifications, the winner was the Thermaltake V9 mid tower. (This was partly due to a combo deal to get a discount on one of the hard drives). This case can take the ATX motherboard that was choosing and provided a good amount of cooling power. With a total of four fans, two 120mm and two 230mm fans should provide ample airflow to dissipate the heat. In addition this case has seven expandable slots. This would allow for some pretty extreme flexibility depending on what circumstances came up in the future of this case. Whether that included cards for eSATA connections, more USB ports, or anything else that can take advantage of those PCI/PCIe slots. Good thing the motherboard that was choosing has a plenty of slots to take advantage of this.
The ASUS M4A78T-E motherboard is one of the ones that was recommended from the AMD website for the CPU that was chosen. This was sufficient as it has enough SATA ports to cover the hard drives and power supply. Being able to support up to 5 SATA connections, 16GB of DDR1333 DIMM RAM, and easily fitting into the case was a great bonus. With the word of mouth and the reviews that I have read about ASUS motherboards helped in my decision, plus it has the new AM3 socket, which is needed for the CPU. The new generation of processors coming out of AMD include a technology called Hyper Transport, which with this board takes the front side bus speed from 2600Mhz to 5200 (MT/s). The Phenom II 955 does such a thing.
The Phenom II quad core 3.2Ghz processor is the brain behind this machine. Keeping in mind that I wanted to host at least one website, an email server, and a database or two I wanted to be sure that the processor itself would slow down under some increased traffic. This processor also contains 4512KB L2 Cache and 6MB of L3 Cache which will help with increased processing demand on this CPU. So far we are starting to gather a lot of power draw, so what kind of power supply was my next question.
After answering the questions on http://www.newegg.com, in their power supply section for, “What power supply do I need?”, I found out that my draw would be around 471 watts. In reading about the Thermaltake case from customer reviews, at least one mentioned getting a power supply that had a fan that faced forward and back, not on the top. This reviewer was mentioning something about how the dust flows, so I took him at his word. I also wanted to be sure to have enough power to power any bus-powered device that might be plugged into the build. 600 watts seemed sufficient and in combination with the fan orientation, meant that my selection would be a bit more limited. Still keeping cost in mind I found my way to the COOLMAX CTI-600B. It is black which goes with the casing color (yay!) and most of the reviews came out at 4 or 5 stars. It has four SATA connectors, which is exactly what I need for this set up, three for the hard drives and one for the DVD RW drive. A 5 year limited warranty on parts and labor doesn’t hurt either!
The drives that will be running this tower is a little bit more complicated. I basically just went with the customer recommended drive from New Egg and it ended up being a Lite-On DVD RW 24X. It is handy that it is a SATA connector for the speed and simplicity of the matter. Now with a server I found out something really important, the system files are super important. The data itself can be replaced fairly easily is a Operating System is still in place. With that in mind I went about designing my hard drive configuration. I wanted a Solid State Drive to house my OS files and knowing that the 30-32GB size was around $100 dollars helped to cement that in place. The case I chose just happen to come as a combo deal with a 1.5TB hard drive and this was a good start for home server storage capacity. Just adding one more of those 1.5TB hard drives brings me up to a total of 3TB of storage outside of my OS. Since the business that I want to run would just be a start up I wouldn’t need the storage capacity of IBM or Google, but 3TB seems like it would hold data for quite some time before an upgrade was needed.
To wrap up the last little bits of hardware before going on to the Operating System will be fairly quick. The 790GX chipset on the motherboard is the same as an ATI Radeon HD3300 and since I won’t be gaming or video editing on this machine that is more than enough. The Via sound card built in can support up to 8 channels, which means if I wanted to stream some internet radio to where I was working on the server I could get surround sound. Once again more than enough for the purpose. And the motherboard has a Gigabit ethernet port, so as far as networking goes for this startup idea, just right. Now the Operating System.
This about taps out the budget that was given, but that was the plan. From the beginning I planned on using a Linux distribution for this home server. All of the main ones come in a 64-bit version, allowing the software to address more than the 3GB limit of a 32-bit OS, and it has no cost in its installation of usage. At least all of the main line server distributions come with pre-compiled packages for what servers I want to host, the set up would be fairly simple. So far I have not found any hardware detection issues with main stream components on using this OS as the community is pretty good about making sure any hardware can run Linux. Specifically, I was going to use Ubuntu Server because I am already familiar with the Ubuntu community and if I wanted to play around with Cloud Computing, this server is set up to work with Amazon’s EC/2 already.
CPU Block Diagram
This is a block diagram that I made for my Introduction to PCs class at ITT Tech in Portland, OR.
M R Jenks' Tech Blog 